LAST DAYS OF A WILDERNESS

YOU SLIDE UNDER ONE LAST heavy tree trunk and, like church doors creaking open, you are admitted into a cathedral of mangroves thick with the smell of things growing.

It has taken 30 minutes to carefully sluice through to the end of Indian Creek, and the payoff is immeasurable.

Floating in a canoe at high tide you can watch a parade of mangrove crabs -- multi-legged creatures the size of quarters -- scurry up tree limbs. A yellow-crowned night heron perched high in the tree offers its profile.

It is quiet here in the way that only dense nature makes things quiet. The screech of a Louisiana heron cuts through the humid air -- and then, serving as a disturbing reminder of where you are, an airliner rumbles overhead as it climbs away from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

This is the kind of story you can paste in an album and later look back at, remembering when nature like this existed in Broward County in the good old days of 1989.

THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF THE ONLY basin mangrove stand of its kind left in the county. It is not a description by environmentalists or scientists or consultants or experts. It is the result of a recent Sunday morning canoe ride.

Seventy acres of mangrove forest stretch along the west bank of the Intracoastal Waterway north of the Dania Cutoff Canal and south of the inlet at Port Everglades.

The Port Authority plans to whack out 18 acres of this mangrove stand later this month to expand operations southward. They will dredge the area to create a turning notch that will allow container ships 950 feet long to make a three- point turn, and make loading and unloading faster and more profitable for the port.

Environmentalists have been trying to save the land for nearly four years. They seem to have lost the battle.

So we would like to take you to the center of this chunk of native Florida because it will not be here much longer. Soon, it will be replaced by container yards and high-speed gantry cranes and asphalt and railroad tracks -- all in the name of profit and progress.

From across the Intracoastal in John U. Lloyd State Park, this tract looks like a low shoreline of creeping, green vegetation, and that is simply what it is.

From the air it looks like a swath of undeveloped land surrounded by the industrial buildup of a busy and successful port, and that is what it is, too.

From the desk of Joseph DeLillo, chairman of the Port Everglades Authority Commission, it looks like an area of "unproductive mangrove" with "limited access to small marine life ..."

But if you take a trip into the mangrove basin you can see with your own eyes that DeLillo's observation is wrong.

To really see the basin you must launch a canoe on an inland canal and paddle along the northern edge of the mangrove forest.

When you reach the Intracoastal Waterway you are at the opening to Indian Creek, a natural cut that flows south into the mangroves. A row of floating orange barrels at the entrance keeps boaters out.

Snook, mullet and young tarpon feed here in the deep water near the mouth of the creek.

As you paddle past the barrels, a kingfisher dive-bombs into the water in the distance and comes up with a silverfish. It is the first sign of the food chain at work.

Heading south and angling west, the creek narrows. The farther back you paddle the darker and less salty the water becomes. The red mangrove trees thicken both in trunk size and foliage. About 400 yards back is a cathedral of thick mangroves. It took decades to mature; it will take days to rip out.

Here in the shade, vegetation falls into the water and deteriorates into food for the tiniest end of the feeding process.

The water is clear enough to see thousands of small silver fishes gliding along the bottom at high tide.

The rise and fall of the tide creates a strong current in the creek. It is like a grocery checkout conveyer belt that rolls out the deteriorated vegetation and small fishes and delivers them up the food chain.

At this far end, deep within the basin, you are in thick, natural Florida.

Although the plan for Port Everglades' new turning notch shows that Indian Creek ends before it reaches the proposed dredge site, that is simply not true.

You can paddle a canoe to within 30 feet of the tree line where the far side of the notch will be dug.

Even though it is far back from the creek's entrance to the Intracoastal, the flushing here seems to be complete. This area is only a mud flat at low tide, but there is not a beer can in sight. What is here is here naturally.

But only five yards away is a barrier created by man. If you are willing to get your feet wet you can tie up the canoe and slog through the water and head farther south. There you will have to climb a mound of trashed industrial pallets that once were used to carry off-loaded goods from some ship and now are crumbling at the edge of the mangrove basin. A rusting length of pipe, three feet in diameter, also has been left for junk, along with the inevitable beer cans.

Within 15 yards you break into the full sunlight onto a gravel roadway which port developers scraped out after filling in what was once mangrove forest.

The view opens to 200 acres of land littered with piles of coral and limestone from nearby excavations. Rusted steel cables lie along the Intracoastal shoreline. Splotches of cement stain the ground where drivers have hosed down the chutes of their cement trucks. The bottles, cans, Styrofoam fast-food containers and plastic wrappings that litter most of the port land are here too.

THIS IS WHERE THE PORT WILL build its proposed $80-million container-yard expansion. But these 200 acres are not enough to include the notch, port officials say. They say they need the other 18 acres too.

A view east from here shows only the high-reaching Australian pines that overwhelm John U. Lloyd Park on the opposite shore. On this side only a thin line of pines separates the area being used by the port from the untouched mangrove basin. The pines will grow only where the natural land has been despoiled.

Like the Brazilian pepper and melaleuca trees, the Australian pines are considered "exotics" -- vegetation that is not natural to the area. They take root because outside forces have created an unnatural opening for them. They get a foothold, muscle in, grow rapidly, and choke off what belongs.

As a gift to the park system to compensate for dredging out the existing mangrove forest, the Port Everglades mitigation plan calls for the destruction of some of these pines. In their place the port promises to plant 160,000 seedling mangroves along the shoreline. This of course is state land that the port cannot use, so they do not mind leaving it to nature.

Alongside an access road to a nearby marina, hundreds of rows of plastic pots are spread over an open clearing.

These are the 160,000 mangrove seedlings, and most of them are dead. The vast majority of the pots are protecting two quarts of dirt and rock. Only a third of the plants show any signs of life.

Port officials say these will make up for the 10-inch-thick mangrove trees back in the cathedral stand. It took 50 years for those trees to grow, and nature did a respectable job of it.

The mitigation plan requires that 80 percent of the seedlings survive. You have to wonder if the port authority is up to the task.

Retracing the route to the mouth of the creek you can swing the canoe west and paddle to the launch area. It is the same route the manatees take when returning to the warm-water discharge at the Florida Power & Light plant.

Before they were lured by the discharge water, the manatees would migrate south to the Caribbean. Now they come here from the north and the south when the water temperature drops. People created the lure, and now maybe they have to face the responsibility of their actions.

As you follow this modern trail of the manatee you come across another water entrance to the 70-acre mangrove forest. This is a highly touted port conservation project where officials say they were creating a more environmentally pleasing area for the manatee. But unless they find a way to raise the water temperature here to the levels near the discharge, forget it.

Ninety percent of the time the animals pass the water basin and instinctively go to the discharge point, where the water is warmest.

Ironically, another part of the port's plan is to construct a manatee refuge and nature-oriented educational center, again, on the other side of the Intracoastal in the state park.

But logic puts another hitch in that plan. The water is no warmer on the other side of the waterway than it is in the port's other manatee basin. You guess whether the manatees will pick that new spot to play.

THE MORNING SUN GROWS HOTTER, and as you paddle back out into the main canal, weekend pleasure boaters at the launch area cruise out with the current.

Now you notice the insidious pines and the erosion they cause along the northern edge of the forest.

As you stand atop a sand-bagged bulkhead pulling out the canoe, a great blue heron floats overhead.

He signals his passing by letting loose a series of bird droppings which splatter on a nearby road.

He has dropped his load before entering the deepest part of the mangrove forest. Like most animals, he knows by instinct not to spoil his own nest.